Quote:
Originally Posted by Wizzy  Something I've been asking myself for some time is the following:
If a person commits a good action with bad motive, is that action good or bad?
Or the opposit, is a bad action with a good motive bad?
Ofcourse I'm talking about morally good/bad, right/wrong etc.
I'll throw out some scenarios for you so you might see a little better what I'm talking about.
Scenario A
Person A owns a small grandma/granpa style bakery, when his business one day lack some cash he borrows it from the local gangster Person B. Person B helps the loan shop out and lend him the money for a normal fee, the same he would have been given at any bank for lending their money. The bakery is soon up and running once again, going great. When Person A dies, he have yet to give the money back to Person B who knew that if he didn't collect the debt, it would grow to the point that he could take the bakery from the now dead Person A, so that his children gets nothing.
Was the action of lending the money good or bad?
Scenario B
Person A is a crime boss, on the orders of him his crew robs and beat up the locals in an area of the city. A person from this area Person B, tries to talk some sence into him but without results, the cops are helpless and won't do anything. When Person A orders the hit of a local shop owner Person B takes action. He gets a gun and shoots Person A.
Was the action of killing the ruthless crime boss good or bad?
Try to see it as a whole, nothing like "well the action is good but the motive is bad", because what interestes me is what it is as a whole.. And please don't get to locked into the scenarios because they're just exampels, not really the question I want you all to answer.
My point of view:
I think the whole good/bad thing is blurry.. According to the law it's close to only the action who decides the punishment, the motive is not as importat..
I can't honestly say if i think a good action with bad motive is good or bad, while at the same time I can't really say if a bad action with a good motive is good or bad.. But of the two, I think the later is better then the first.. |
Philosophers have tended to call actions "right" or "wrong". Philosophers, who are sometimes called, "consequentialists" have graded actions in terms of their consequences for those affected by the consequences, and actions whose consequences are good have been said to be actions which are right, and actions with bad consequences, wrong. So, it seems to me that an action may have a good motive, say love for a child, but it is easy to think of an action motivated by love, which may have bad consequences (smothering love for the child, for example) And it is just as easy to think of an action which has a bad motive, but which has good consequences. Whether we should judge an action by its motive, or by its consequences, is an old and vexed question in moral philosophy. Immanuel Kant held that since no one could be sure of what the consequences of his action would be, since chance often takes a hand, all a person can do is make sure that his motive was a good one. On the other hand, the philosopher, John Stuart Mill, thought that Kant's view was unthinking, and that a moral person had to take the probable consequences of his action into account before deciding whether to do that action. Mill thought that Kant was really confusing the moral worth of the action with the moral worth of the person who was performing the action. The moral worth of the action was a function of the probable consequences of the action. But the moral worth of the person had to be judged in terms of the persons motive. And a good person might (as we saw) perform wrong actions from good motives; and, of course, a bad person may perform a right action for bad motives.
In his play,
Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot has Thomas Becket says, "The greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason". But, of course, Mill would not agree.